


A Sound Prospect

by musamihi



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Dubious Consent, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-05
Updated: 2013-01-05
Packaged: 2017-11-23 19:03:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/625536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft invites James Moriarty, a brilliant but reckless young man, into his world – and then scrambles to stop him eating it from the inside out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Sound Prospect

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kirstenlouise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirstenlouise/gifts).



> Written for kirstenlouise for the Holmestice December 2012 exchange. **Warnings** for dubious consent, hateful/sexist/homophobic language, violence, references to torture; explicit sexual content, references to cross-dressing.

At first, Moriarty was only a voice. He was a soft drawl breaking against the clipped, bitter ends of words, an anger and an arrogance poorly concealed behind artificial nonchalance. Mycroft sat alone in the grey electronics room; there was nothing here except the massive tape deck, the bulky headphones, and his perfectly blank notepad; and yet there was a certain presence in that scraping, staticy recording, and for the first time since he was perhaps six years old he felt a very powerful and thoroughly illogical urge to glance over his shoulder.

 _"Is that for me?"_ Moriarty: petulant, disdainful. The sounds of the alley were sharp and overmodulated, rustling clothes and amplified engines passing by. The hidden microphone picked up rather more of the slamming bass inside the adjacent club than it should have. Poorly calibrated.

 _"It's from Alfred,"_ Mycroft's agent replied. He was a thick man with a thick northern accent and very little talent for anything beyond knocking people around and keeping his mouth shut. For such low-level errands as this, he was perfect. This was the very first time one of his reports had come back with irregularities striking enough to make Mycroft bother to listen to the recording.

 _"Alfred's never given me a penny,"_ Moriarty said.

 _"I don't care what he gave you."_ A little disgust; a nice touch. _"But he says you'll take this and then you won't see him no more. That's all. So take the money and don't you think about calling him. Clear?"_

 _"Alfred's paying me off."_ Was that scepticism or amusement? Mycroft thought he detected a hint of a smile, but that might only have been the lilting tone.

_"Call it what you like. You just stay away from him."_

A paper sound; either the cash was changing hands, or someone was pulling out a cigarette. Silence. _"You ought to be paying_ him _off."_

_"You take the money and you keep your mouth –"_

_"Do you think I don't know what he is?"_ There was the first little lash of anger, Moriarty's words jamming together with frustration. _"You think I don't know what he does for a living? He's an idiot. You should be taking him out back and buying him out, not –"_

There was an impact and a grunt; another impact and a dull sound of protest, this time from further away, perhaps on the ground. One didn't deploy muscle unless one was willing to let it have free rein. _"Take your money, you fucking faggot, or don't."_ The slap of an envelope hitting the ground. _"Come near him again and I'll break the rest of your teeth for you."_

 _"And how much is even in here?"_ Moriarty's voice was nasal now, but more composed. _"A few thousand, maybe?"_ (It was one thousand, which was usually quite enough to get rid of men like Moriarty, eighteen-year-old waiters living from sofa to sofa while getting wrapped up in ill-advised love affairs.) _"Alfred's not the only idiot, I guess. What do I want with that pile of nothing? Do you know how much I could make right now selling the fucking lamp?"_ A pause, no doubt Moriarty waiting for the seriousness of the situation to dawn on his assailant. It never did, because no brass-knuckled errand-runner knew about the Lamp; _Alfred_ didn't know about it.

But Mycroft did. And Mycroft wrote on his notepad – very calmly, though the back of his neck was prickling under his collar – one word: _Problem._

 _"So keep your money,"_ Moriarty continued, some of the wind having gone out of his sails – it must have been quite disappointing to lay down such a stunning blow and have it pass unnoticed. _"And tell Alfred from me he's a stupid cunt."_

That was the entirety of the exchange. The muddied envelope with its full thousand pounds in cash had been returned along with the agent's report that _subject was stubborn son of a bitch despite application of some force_ and Mycroft had thought perhaps they would have to make another, more subtle attempt, but this …

The tape cut out. He slid the headphones off and simply stared for a few moments at the array before him, hands folded beneath his chin. The Lamp was as sensitive an operation as he had running, a search for a loyal, discreet, and highly-placed friend in the increasingly troubling world of the Cousins' operations in Iraq – rifling around in one's friends' private effects was always much more awkward than crossing enemy lines – and to find it so completely compromised as to have penetrated down to the sexual dalliance of an agent who wasn't even involved in the project would seem to require its immediate termination. The whole thing would almost certainly have to be scrapped. If anyone were to tip off the Americans, or, God forbid, one of Hussein's – no, it would be better to lose the operation, even if it would set him back three years.

First, though, Moriarty would have to be examined. Mycroft would do it tomorrow, and he would do it himself. If he was going to knock his career off-track because one of his agents couldn't keep his mouth shut in bed, he thought he ought at least to be able to look the cause in the face.

***

The restaurant was one he would never have set foot in of his own volition, a cramped, self-consciously shabby affair in Soho that seemed to think specifying the origin of their ridiculously fussy vegetables justified charging twice the price. Luckily, he only had to go around the back to find the man he wanted – and so his second encounter with James Moriarty, like his first, involved a darkened alley. It was the beginning of December, and the sun had set well before Mycroft had left his office. Now there was only an unshaded yellow bulb hanging over the unmarked back door to light the overflowing bins and the one man who leaned against the wall with a cigarette in his hand.

"Mr Moriarty." Mycroft was careful to step around as much of the rubbish as he possibly could, but most of his attention was focused on studying the man in front of him, in forcing his eyes to adjust to the sharp contrast of light and dark that threw him into odd, creeping shadows.

Moriarty lifted his chin. His left eye was swollen half-shut and his lower lip was split, and the makeup he'd applied wasn't doing much to ameliorate either. He might have been pretty enough under normal circumstances, Mycroft supposed, but he wasn't what he had expected, really – too boyish, skinny, with weak shoulders and a hairline that wasn't going to hold out for very much longer. His shoes were on-trend, but had been polished within an inch of their lives – vanity, poverty, no real frugality – and he was carrying himself in that almost imperceptibly lopsided way that came from cramped and unforgiving sleeping quarters. Mycroft was surprised not to see it more pronounced; from what he could tell, Moriarty hadn't had a proper place to live since he'd arrived in London, which appeared to have been some nine months ago.

"Time for the carrot, is it?" Moriarty muttered around his cigarette. "Do you lot always appear to people in darkened alleys? It's a little on the nose, isn't it?"

Mycroft smiled. "It's where you keep turning up."

Moriarty's lips drew down a little. "I don't want your money."

"I'm not here to offer you money." The briefcase at his side was more for gesturing than for anything else. One should never underestimate the value of a good prop. "You were very clear, I understand, when you turned that down last night."

"I was also pretty clear about where –"

"That we should give it to Alfred instead, yes. I heard. I'm inclined to agree, as a matter of fact." Mycroft watched very carefully now for any tell – but his focus was of necessity more broad than he'd have preferred. He knew far less about this man than would have made him comfortable. "If he's been as indiscreet as it seems he has."

The reaction was surprisingly obvious. Moriarty seemed to coil, a very slight all-over tightening combined with a conscious (and only partially successful) effort to keep his eyes from travelling again over Mycroft's entire height, the automatic reassessment that came with any significant turn. He was eager. He was anxious. He was quite clearly taut with desire. That didn't bode particularly well – a thirst for power was unexceptional in the extreme, a need to prove oneself tended to manifest in selfish and reckless ways, and a longing for some more specific goal would mean Moriarty was already in someone's employ. Nonetheless, Mycroft waited. Unconscious displays were only ever half the story.

And it didn't take long for the face Moriarty _wanted_ to put forward to appear: his keen expression resolved into a smirk, an impressively convincing show of uncomplicated self-satisfaction. "Well, it's not really his fault. Is it? He can't help being a fool."

"He can refrain from telling you state secrets, I think."

A flash of irritation mingled with pride. "He didn't tell me very much." A savage smirk, as grating as the squeak and scratch of a microphone overloaded, feeding back. Moriarty's desire to prove himself was truly deafening. "He didn't have to. If I needed someone like him to tell me what I – well. I figured it out on my own. Your Lamp of Diogenes." There was a line of teasing in his voice that Mycroft might have found vexing (particularly paired with so sensitive a piece of information) had the desperation for approval not been so apparent. Everything about Moriarty was so glaringly _young_ – everything except the mind that had somehow burrowed into Mycroft's very secret world.

Mycroft inclined his head. "I'd very much like to talk to you about that."

"Not going to have your goons beat it out of me?"

"That, I think, would be a waste." Because if Moriarty was heavy-handed and proud, he did at least appear to be talented. And Mycroft hadn't got where he was today by ignoring talent. "But neither is _this_ really the place. Here." He produced a card, blank but for the time and address he'd printed on the back. "If you can find the time, we can forego the goons."

Moriarty took it, and it was in that moment that Mycroft saw the first hints of skilful self-consciousness about him. In the space of an instant his posture went from defensive to casual, his expression from grasping and closed to easy and blank. It was an act, but it was a good one – given an inch, given a little hope, he was capable of manufacturing as effective a veil as most Mycroft had ever seen. When their eyes met one last time before Moriarty slunk back into the restaurant, there was imagination and life to be seen in addition to rank desire, and Mycroft was left with more than a vague hope that the man could be made into something.

***

In the months that followed, Moriarty – James – proved himself worthy of all of Mycroft's expectations. He was brilliant, he was surprisingly subtle (when he wasn't being gratuitously vulgar or simple), and he was eager, a man who loved the work for the work and who seemed to soak it up like a plant in a desert. A love of being clever wasn't the same as a love of one's country, of course, but true patriotism as a driving force was rare enough that not even the Lamp (which had been regrettably dismantled) had ever had ambitions of finding it residing in a living human being. James was one of the best liars Mycroft had ever met, and he was absolutely incorruptible. He valued neither money nor reputation. He was too arbitrary a man to bribe. To most men who worked with him, James was an enigma, but Mycroft felt he understood him. The base, almost biological need for _diversion_ was nothing new to him. He had filled his own yearning for challenge and for triumph through his work, but watching James – still grappling with the world in hopes of grabbing onto something that would fight back against him for once – he couldn't help but see his brother. James was something like Sherlock, but with real ambition and a little more _joie de vivre_.

It was a terrifying prospect.

Mycroft kept him all the closer because of it. He extended him intimacies and privileges unheard of, entertaining him after hours in his office, letting James debrief or simply ponder. He took dinner with him. He let him share his car as far as their journeys home overlapped. He listened to him, even when he could hardly bear the arrogance or the inanity of James’ sillier, more entitled moods. Most of the time, after all, it was rewarding – James was, nine times out of ten, fascinating, although there was almost always something just a little _off_. But Mycroft thought there was something just a little off about most people, really. He found fault with the stock of humanity so frequently that minor complaints like inflated ego or a lack of empathy or overly sexual presentation could drift by without raising too many red flags.

And so it was with genuine surprise – never a feeling Mycroft associated with anything but rage – that he began to discover, perhaps a year after James had come under his wing, the minefield that his protégé had been leaving steadily in his wake. One affair exposed was bad enough; one dalliance with another of Mycroft's agents would have been sufficient for severe reprimand and reconsideration. But uprooting James' latest indiscretion only led, like a stringy network of weeds, to another and another and another, all in an unbroken chain carrying him all the way back to Alfred. It was unforgivable. It was _stupid_. It was the behaviour of a man who let his body and shallow flattery rule his mind and his determination.

Which meant it was a lie. That was not James Moriarty. Whatever he was, he was not stupid, and he was not interested in shallow flattery. Why, then, this rash of intolerable idiocy? The coded phone calls, the clandestine meetings, the gifts and compensation some of the stupider men had seen fit to provide all spelled it out as clearly as if it had been sent round in a memo. James Moriarty was fucking half the men he worked with, a seriously impressive number considering how many of them were married with mistresses. Why? Mycroft kept his own house clean enough to know there was no foreign influenced involved, no double agent nonsense. Moriarty was sabotaging himself completely under his own power. And he certainly wasn't doing it because any of them were irresistible, that Mycroft could attest to. Not from pure physical desire – that could be much more easily satisfied through other avenues.

But then – perhaps that was why. Nothing with James could ever be easy. He abhorred the undemanding. Could it be that he was, in some perverse way, just trying to make things harder for himself?

It was on one of their shared rides home that Mycroft raised the issue. It was late – almost midnight. He was too disgusted, too disappointed, to keep it to himself for very much longer. And James' obvious anxiety to be home as soon as possible suggested very strongly yet _another_ upcoming bout of misbehaviour, and Mycroft had had quite enough.

"You can't keep on this way, you realize." Mycroft kept his eyes on the reflection of his own coat sleeve in the window. "You'll have made the department too hot to hold you – or to hold any of your partners, for that matter. I understand you're not a man of conscience, but you can't imagine I would allow you to destroy quite so completely everything I've worked for."

James said nothing. The corner of his mouth distended downward, a little glimpse of irritation. But he remained stubbornly silent.

"You can't think," Mycroft continued, louder, sharper, "that I would ever let you –"

"Oh, what's the matter?" James snapped, bringing his hand down with a deep slapping sound against the window. "None of it matters. None of it means anything. It won't make a lick of difference, it never will –"

"No difference?" Mycroft could scarcely believe the naïveté – didn't believe it, in fact. "No difference, when someone catches wind of the fact that half our circle is primed and ready for blackmailing? No difference, when –"

James laughed. "Please. You're not serious." There was contempt in his voice, but it was flat, unhappy, nothing like the gloating he used to engage in when someone proved himself a fool. "It was too easy. If anyone really wanted to blackmail any of them, they'd have done it already. Do you know how I got started? Do you know the great flaming hoops I had to jump through to get one of your precious _circle_ to put himself in the line of blackmail? Hm? I smiled at Richards in the washroom. That was it. Three seconds later he had his hand on my arse. He was born _primed and ready for blackmail._ Jesus."

"Spare me the details of your ridiculous antics, if it isn't too much trouble." They were stomach-turning in more ways than one.

"I don't think I will. The next one was a little harder, I'll grant – him I had to liquor up a little. But two whiskey sodas is hardly a masterful turn of espionage, is it? It should take more than a couple of drinks and telling someone you'll _be a good boy for him_ to pull a man into danger of losing his livelihood."

"Stop it." Worse even than the vulgar details was the bitter disappointment evident in James' face and in his tone and in every movement of his hands, because it confirmed Mycroft's suspicions. James had only been looking for something to do.

"I'm not going to stop." James shrugged. His shoulders had lost some of that childish inward turn they'd once had. Now they hung as though useless, as though it were hardly worth the effort to stand up straight. "I'm seeing Grimes tonight, actually. That's a great story. The first time was nothing special; I just let him bend me over in the records room. But the whole time he's standing there moaning about how good I'd look in high heels, and I thought, fuck, why not? At least that might be _interesting_. Don't worry – it wasn't. Oh, but he's brought me a dress tonight, like that's some big fucking thing. I bet you my last penny he'll spend most of the night like last time, pulling my hair and making me tell him what a dirty sissy slut I am. It's all the same. Everyone's always the same. And I could take every one of them down with a word, if I wanted to."

James slumped against the door, in that instant eminently petulant. He looked as though he were about to lash out and kick at the seat in front of him. "I thought," he said, "it would be harder."

And Mycroft understood, in a way. He ought perhaps to have seen it earlier. A man like James could only ever be self-destructive – turning his mind out on the world and finding nothing to feed it, he would of course turn back on himself. Everything was too easy, so he would trip himself up. When one cared not a bit for the result, when the process was everything, smooth roads to success would only ever be maddening. Unless entertained, James would keep throwing a spanner into his own projects just to have something to work on. Mycroft wasn't certain the man _knew_ it, but _he_ recognized it. He saw it for what it was. It was a vicious cycle with nothing but emptiness at the end of the spiral.

He should have ended it then and there by cutting James off entirely. Why he bothered trying to talk him down from it he had no idea – some unwillingness, perhaps, to lose so much sunk cost. Some idea that set loose, on his own, James would be far more dangerous than he was conducting sabotage under supervision. "That will never be hard," he said. "If you're looking for a challenge, you'll never find it there." And it was in everyone's interest, he was sure, that James should find a challenge somehow.

"What would you suggest, then?" The words came out almost scrapingly dry. "Turning my heart to queen and country, is that it? Dear me, Mr Holmes." There was just a hint of teeth in the slow half-smile on his face, visible in the shifting, dim illumination of the streetlights. "Give me some credit – I learn from my mistakes. If I want that sort of challenge, I know exactly where to find it."

They said not another word to one another. When James stepped out onto the curb, and the door slammed shut behind him, Mycroft watched him walk away around the next corner – and felt something like the dread and revulsion that came with waking up to a window left unintentionally open, to the knowledge that something had been let in that wouldn't be easily chased out again.

***

Mycroft would no more have turned James out into the cold than he'd have released a rabid wolf into the streets, but keeping him was no picnic. Having him killed was certainly an option (and Mycroft seriously considered it when he began to catch James staring at _him_ like he wanted a taste), but that would be giving up too easily. Having identified the problem – James was bored – Mycroft felt it was incumbent upon him at least to try to manage him. There was some pride in the matter, too; if anyone were going to bring James to heel, it would be him. It could _only_ be him. Who else had the tools? Who else had the subtlety? Who else had the sheer brain power to keep the man diverted?

And if it wasn't him, who could think he would ever let it be anybody else?

Two nights after their awkward ride, he met James in the records room of the adjoining building, a satellite storage facility for some minor function of the Land Registry – a space so overwhelmingly uninteresting that when he had at first discovered it several years ago he'd been quite sure it must be bugged. But, shockingly, it was not, and through his own exertions he had kept it in this innocent state for his own purposes. It was not comfortable – there was one small table for sorting and one uncomfortable chair and the rest was close-packed shelves and insufficient ventilation – but he never came to conduct comfortable business.

He found James leaning against the back of the chair. There was a slight warp to the knees of his trousers and an accumulated fold above the elbows of his shirt, as though he'd been – crawling. The scent of mouthwash was fresh, if not particularly strong, and the corners of his mouth were ever so slightly relaxed from stretching – teeth recently brushed. His hair was far too neat for this time of day, underneath the alcoholic mint smell there was an unmistakable hint of sweat and another man's clothes and cologne, and on the wing of James' shirt collar there was a little damp patch, abraded from scrubbing, and beside it just a fleck of a stain he'd missed out, a stain that by its size and distribution and consistency could only be –

Mycroft reacted not at all, simply giving James his customary nod of greeting and laying his file with a casual snap on the table. But that was when he knew – that was when he should have known to turn and walk away and see at once to the disposal of this failed and disastrous experiment. James wasn't even trying to hide that he _knew_ , that he was revelling – no, not in anything so open as a smile, but his eyes were practically gleeful – in the fact that Mycroft knew. He had seen Mycroft's ability to read human minutiae and raised him a glaringly obvious tableau of debauchery, and the trouble was that now Mycroft couldn't know if it was real or put on. If James took pleasure in letting himself fall under the scrutiny of Mycroft's deductive powers, it would only be a matter of time before he started taking pleasure in manipulating them, assuming he wasn't already. Mycroft was willing to surround himself with all manner of oily, unsavoury liars, but he could not tolerate someone who made him mistrust his own eyes.

And yet – neither could he give James the satisfaction. Not now.

"I've brought you a bit of a puzzle," he said, tapping the file where it lay. "I thought you the most likely person for it. I think you'll enjoy it." He was hoping he would. If James required interesting work to keep himself distracted, Mycroft, no pristine model of lawfulness, had plenty he could give him. It was nothing he'd ever handed off to anyone so junior before (and God, it was easy to look at James and think _just a boy_ ), but Jim required special attention. Clearly.

James smiled at him. If he was annoyed to have his feint so blatantly ignored, he didn't show it. "I'm sure I will."

"One of your chickens has come home to roost." Mycroft rested his hands on the table and raised his eyebrows, not without reproach. "Grimes, as you'll be no doubt unsurprised to hear. He received an overture only yesterday from China – they move very quickly." For which he could hardly blame them; Grimes was very highly placed, and had made himself so easy to pick off the only surprise was that there hadn't been a feeding frenzy.

"Oh." James grinned, ducking his chin to his chest for a moment; a private laugh. "Oh, that's funny. China. Just the other night, you know, he was telling me I looked like a whore he met in –"

"It is _not_ funny. It is a problem." Mycroft's mouth pinched flat. He was still mostly unconvinced of the wisdom of this little project, but he hardly felt he had a choice. "You're going to end him."

James straightened, side-stepped the chair, and hauled himself up to sit on the table, his legs dangling over the edge. "End him," he repeated, sly. "Sounds dramatic."

"The method I leave up to you." Let him run a little wild in this, burn off some energy – whom would it hurt? Well, aside from Grimes. "But within forty-eight hours he _will_ be over. They won't get him to defect that quickly; he has a family, after all."

"All over," James drawled, picking up the file – and swinging his foot gently up to rest against the inside of Mycroft's knee. "You do love everything so neat and –"

"Stop that." Mycroft stepped composedly back. He'd expected this; of course he had. "You will _stop_ this. Once Grimes is out of the picture, you'll have made your point, I think. I won't have you salting the earth anymore. Do you understand? This is the end. If you find yourself in need of something more stimulating –" Here James snickered, and Mycroft steadfastly ignored him – "than your usual work, I'll find something for you. But there will be no more of this ridiculous catting around."

"Or you'll end me?"

"You'll be killed." Ambiguity had its time and its place.

James bit into his lower lip, distorting his smile; it struck Mycroft as particularly obscene. Red. "Well," he said, dropping the folder in his lap. "Whatever you say, Mr Holmes." He hopped down, gave a salute with the file, and on his way out of the room brushed Mycroft's hip with the back of his hand as suggestively as Mycroft had known he would.

None of it was at all reassuring. Mycroft spent a very late night in his office, and a long, dark morning in his bed with dread lying palpably beside him, as heavy and real as a man, a man who, when Mycroft shut his eyes, had a red mouth and skinny, sloping shoulders and dark, lovely, terrible eyes. He knew nothing good could come of this.

And as always, he was right.

It was two o'clock in the morning, not too much more than twenty-four hours after James had been given his little assignment, that Mycroft found himself in the distasteful position of knocking openly on one of his agents’ doors. But taste had capitulated hours ago to the necessity of fury, and James wasn’t long for the service, anyhow. He very likely wasn’t long for the world, and whatever compunctions Mycroft might have had about showing his face around a corpse in waiting, they were effectively assuaged by the fantasy he was currently indulging of making personally certain that James Moriarty was subjected to complete _damnatio memoriae_. He knew how to end a man. He knew James did, too, knew he knew better than to ruin Grimes’ department along with the man’s career, projects tumbling down like so much flatware off a rent tablecloth. Grimes was over, that was undeniable, but only because James had exposed him to the higher-ups who wouldn’t know intelligence - in any sense of the word - if it shoved them from behind. Mycroft had spent the past six hours on the phone with the sort of people who broadcast their uselessness with their titles - was there anything more absurd than an _elected_ official pretending to power? - and he knew very well James had meant it to add insult to injury. He’d almost rather have a dirty agent than have to watch his dirty laundry circulate among the stupider ranks of government.

James answered the door in a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, showing none of the rumpled signs of sleep - and none of the reluctance that might have been expected of someone disturbed at home in the middle of the night. He stepped back at once with a quiet smile and an inviting shrug of his shoulder. “Funny. I’ve just put the kettle on.”

“I don’t usually come this far just to tell a man what he already knows.” Mycroft stepped inside and snapped the door shut behind him, and realized fully only then why he actually _had_ come. His stomach turned, but he kept straight, cool, unhurried even in anger. “But seeing as your last wish appears to have been to draw attention to yourself, I thought it would be rude not to oblige you.”

James turned to wander lazily back into his sitting room, throwing a disheveled newspaper off of an armchair.. “And you’re never rude, are you? What is it I already know? Don’t dance around it.” He smiled, reaching up to rub at the back of his neck; and Mycroft nearly shuddered at the sight of the emphatically empty chair, James’ open posture pointing to it as neatly as a drawn arrow. “You were so admirably direct, before - I like that.”

“You’re finished.” There was no need for pleasantries. “You won’t last out the day. If you have any personal affairs to see to, not that you can _possibly_ have had the time, you might want to -”

“There’s a rare favour. What have I done to deserve advance notice? You’re not usually so considerate.” James crossed his arms over his chest, turning inward as though he were cold. He was impossibly artificial, down to the last hair. “And here I thought you’d be angry.”

Mycroft advanced a step, two steps, like a man going to the gallows. “You might have made something of yourself, once.” James had had promise, in his own way. If he hadn’t insisted on ransacking everything around him in a search for something that probably didn’t even exist, if he hadn’t shown such a delight in unraveling himself … 

But that was James, and it was very clear now that what he’d started he wouldn’t stop until he had what he wanted. He had set his sights, as he always did, on the most unattainable item in the vicinity, and he would continue smashing his surroundings until he found a way to send it toppling down into his reach. Now the object of his pursuit was undoubtedly Mycroft, and there was no way to put him off the hunt except to kill him, or to give in.

Or at least to make a good show of it.

“I’ve made a mess of myself,” James replied, his voice lilting with mockery. “That’s something.”

“You have.” Another step closer; Mycroft tipped his chin up, the better to look down his nose at him. How convincing would he have to be, he wondered? Killing James, despite his earlier threats, seemed the less likely choice; as self-destructive as he was, James could be trusted to save his own skin when he wanted to. Murdering him would almost certainly involve too much effort to be worth the waste. But _this_ would require no resources at all, no one else’s time or reputation, no manpower better used elsewhere. Convincing James that Mycroft wasn’t worth chasing would tax no one but Mycroft - and he was nothing if not self-sacrificing. The work was the work. “An awful mess. You’ll put me to a great deal of trouble, cleaning it up. You could at the very least apologize.”

There was the first flicker of uncertainty, a very slight narrowing of the eyes. James shifted on his feet, and Mycroft felt his pulse in his throat. “You came for an apology, did you?” There was a hint of skepticism there, and Mycroft couldn’t blame him. It was ridiculous.

But he pressed on regardless. “It’s only polite - and we must never be rude. An apology, a little gratitude - these things can mend fences, if not rebuild the bridges you’ve dropped into the water. I would think you’d be a man very eager to mend fences.” Mycroft stepped forward again, wrenching every fiber of himself in allowing his arm to graze James’ side. And then he sat, dropping himself into the chair with an ease that took all of his resolve to produce.

He knew he’d won the moment the disappointment broke onto James’ face like something sick pushing up through a drain. People were always ready to believe what they expected to believe, and James always, always expected to be disappointed. That Mycroft should be just another superior looking to browbeat and blackmail his way into sex should have been impossible to credit, but when a man believed himself so very fully to be alone in the universe, how hard could it ever be to think the worst of people? James thought he had found someone worth pursuing in Mycroft, because of course Mycroft would never allow himself to be caught, and that was the only worthy prey the world ever could provide. But now Mycroft was showing himself as base and easily satisfied as all the other men James had ever met, and it was no different than a dog showing its belly. The chase was over, the game was done, the ending was not an ending. James had been running after the wrong rabbit all along.

Of course, James would call his bluff. What good predator wouldn’t?

“I am grateful,” James said, masking his disappointment immediately behind an impressive veil of twitchy fear. He could act to so many layers - a miserable man playing a terrified man playing a conniving one. “I am. I could be.” He stood so awkwardly, as though he’d never been in this position before. Mycroft could see how a man might find it fetching, if he was stupid enough to be taken in by it.

Mycroft gazed up at him, watching impassively; on the count of five, he raised his eyebrows, letting his mouth purse impatiently. By the count of seven, James was on his knees.

“Oh, yes,” Mycroft said, imbuing the words with as much feigned boredom as he could muster. James wasn’t the only one who could do layers. _A smart man playing a cruel, stupid, needy one playing at power._ “Everyone knows what you mean by ‘gratitude,’ don’t they.”

“It’s the kind you came for.” The disrespect in his voice, masked as it was, was sharp enough to sting; and so when James snaked his hand up along Mycroft’s thigh toward his belt, Mycroft slapped it away.

A pause; James’ gentle, shallow breathing, and the dark rustle of his thoughts that Mycroft could almost hear: _Oh, one of those._ He turned his face up to Mycroft’s and his mouth twitched before he said the word, somehow managing to make it sound like pulling teeth rather than spitting contempt:

“Please?”

Mycroft felt something dangerously close to a real thrill. “Say it again.”

James wasted a few moments pretending to be confused, embarrassed, angry, the usual tiresome routine, before he complied: “Please.”

“Like you mean it, if you don’t mind. One would think a man with his life on the line would be able to drag up a little enthusiasm.” He might as well enjoy himself, after all, and this he did love - even if someone kneeling between his ankles was a little on the nose, he had only rarely passed up an opportunity in his life to jerk someone’s leash. There weren’t many places where he could exercise the full extent of his control without compromising his usefulness, but when he came by the chance he bloody well made the most of it. 

And so by the time James had progressed past tentative, stammered _please_ s to _please let me touch you_ to _please put your fingers in my mouth_ to _please let me unzip you_ to _please let me touch your cock, please just let me taste it, please, please, please_ to outright begging, Mycroft was sufficiently physically aroused not to excite suspicion. And if he came almost immediately after James wrapped his lips around him, he didn’t expect James was really used to any better - and for his part, the real pleasure had passed the moment words gave way to wet, sucking sounds. 

He left James’ flat as he knew he would have to, having fallen so far in the man’s esteem that he would no longer be a target. It was a hard walk down the bright, cheaply carpeted corridor, knowing that for possibly the first time in his life he’d intentionally made a fool of himself (and just a little worried that James had seen the genuine pleasure lying deep beneath the gaudy performance he’d given). But that was the work. And when James disappeared the next day, he expected the next he would hear of him would be that his body had been found. If even Mycroft Holmes wasn’t a man worth chasing, after all, what could the world possibly hold?

***

The room was grey, small, empty - a pair of headphones (much smaller, these days), a table and chair, a notepad, and Mycroft - still a happy devotee of pen and paper, when he could get away with it. The lights were dim, a concession to the one-way mirror dominating the wall. The glow of a Blackberry would have been enough to alert any moderately observant man on the other side that he was not alone, and so Mycroft's was enjoying a reprieve in his jacket pocket.

It was, of course, a needless precaution. The man on the other side knew very well that he was being watched. His stolid, incorrigible silence practically screamed it. All Mycroft could hear of James Moriarty this time (he certainly would never assent to call him _Jim_ ) was his rasping breathing, the slow fidgeting of his ankles in their shackles, the occasional and involuntary grunt born of a fist to his stomach or a meal tray to the back of his head. Even when shouted awake every thirty minutes throughout the artificial and shifting nights, dragged from windowless room to windowless room, starved and force-fed and incessantly interrogated, he had been as silent as was physically possible, eerily so; it was as though his voice was separate from himself. He was a cough, a clearing of the throat, a gasp - all the contentless material that filled the edges around human sound. He was white noise.

But finally he spoke, interrupting the man who'd been about to swing at his face again, and sounding more like someone working sleep out of his throat than something that had been tortured for more than a week.

"I don't want to talk about this," he said, staring directly into the mirror. Mycroft wouldn't have liked to guess whether James was speaking to his own reflection or to the man he knew sat just behind it. "Let's talk about something else."

Mycroft hesitated.

He never had been more than an adversary to James; it was the only mutual position to which they were suited. Mycroft was too careful, too driven, too focused to keep James' interest for very long, and James was unpredictable, too faulty, too self-destructive to be useful. They were men who had the power to thwart one another, and they shared little else in common. And Mycroft would thwart him now, but - what did that mean for a man like James, whose only goal seemed to be his own annihilation? How did one destroy a man who sought only defeat? Questions that answered themselves, solutions that lay in the open as plain as a length of rope, were almost never worth taking - not because they were _boring_ or _too easy_ , or anything so silly as that, but because they were suspect. Because when a man acted as though he wanted nothing more than to hang himself, it was always a pretense. 

This time, he suspected it wasn't. All the same, if he handed James the key to his destruction (absolutely necessary, as a matter of security) it would come at a personal price. The fuel for James' fever was no secret. More than likely it would burn up with him. Give James Sherlock, and it would be a week at most before -

But then, Mycroft had always been willing to give of himself if the situation demanded it. Allowing for the odd personal defeat was the only way to keep oneself mindful of what really mattered. He'd already let James have a bite at his pride; this would hardly sting at all, in comparison.

He stood up, and tapped on the mirror, and went to the door.


End file.
